As Beginnings Go

The airport is clean and almost hospital sterile, which is not unusual (in her past experience, at least. In a few hours all of that will change forever). She makes her way through crowds of people who mostly don't speak her language, letting them drift past her and their words flow through her. She hitches her red backpack higher on her shoulder and follows signs to her destination, all alone on the middle leg of her journey, in the middle of a continent she has visited before, on her way to something she knows she can not even imagine, which has never stopped her from trying.

Finally she reaches her gate, and is brought up short: there are two lines (queues, she reminds herself, they are queues now) and no indication of what people are standing waiting for. And she is, for the first time on her adventures, different, in that way that only your skin color can make you. Never in her life has this girl, this on-the-verge-of-woman, felt her skin as a thing with a life separate from herself. Never has she seen herself as an outsider, an other, a someone-not-like-us. And that, more than tearful goodbyes in the airport, going through security, or any of the other busywork business of travel, brings it home: she is not in Kansas anymore, Toto, not surrounded by anything close to familiar, and she has only just begun this trip, this year-long journey to find herself or follow her dream or just get the hell out of town. Whatever the reason du jour, she needed to leave, could not understand why, but could feel that need slipping and burning under her skin, an emotional growing pain. And now that her skin is burning again, she asks herself why she had to leave, and realizes that it doesn't matter. She is here. She has performed the act of leaving, that single step that begins any journey, that first long, hard fall. And as she watches (observes, putting long-practiced skills to use), finds the right queue, enters the waiting area, and finds a seat, she knows. This will not kill her. Yes, she is uncomfortable, really and truly uncomfortable, for the first time in her life. But that discomfort will not kill her, and it will pass. Yes, she is alien or different or one of those words, but that life experience is not unique to her, and it will be a valuable feeling to pull out and remember in six months, when she is comfortable, though the thought of being comfortable seems about six thousand months away at the moment. So she takes a breath, puts down her bag, and looks around.

Most of the seats in the waiting area are full, and more people are handing their passports over to the guard, awaiting permission to enter. There is more foreignness in this small space than she felt the first time she saw Paris or Amsterdam or any other place she has been, and maybe that has something to do with the deep, quiet voices rumbling in languages she can not even begin to identify, or maybe it has something to do with the riot of color and pattern and cut of clothing that covers all of the people packed in around her. A group of nuns in full habit, right out of The Sound of Music, shuffles past in ugly utilitarian shoes and thick support hose, clutching giant handbags and whispering to each other. A family, small son and required infrastructure secured to a stroller, lounges against the wall, father peeking at his large gold watch and adjusting the belt around his waist that exactly matches his tan leather shoes. Old men and young men, children and mothers and grandparents, single travelers and whole tribes, all gather around and wait for the signal to board the plane. As beginnings go, it is a good one.